10 June 2015 – Live Set @ Esc Collective

On 10 June, 2015 Southampton’s Esc Collective held their end-of-year festival ‘Escape to the Country’. Netley Chapel and the surrounding Royal Victoria Park in Southampton provided an inspiring setting to relax, listen to great music, and of course dance!

My gratitude goes out to everyone who helped make the event possible – and to everyone who attended!

The Octatrack is the heart of the setup – It has many functions, but is most important for sequencing the Virus and mixing audio and effects. 6 of the 8 MIDI parts are used for sequencing Virus parts, and the final 2 are used for automating Multi/Bank chnages on the other 2 instruments when changing tracks.

There’s good reason that the Virus has remained one of the top performance synths, unchanged, for over 10 years now. Many newer synths on the market are quite limited in the number of different instrument parts that can be played simultaneously, but the the Virus has always had a full 16. I don’t ever use the ‘TI’ software, but the new distortion and tape delay models are big additions over the C.

The LXR is an amazing little machine – nothing else sounds quite like it, and it’s all open source! Julian Schmidt at Sonic Potions has done fantastic work on it, and I’ve added quite a few custom features. Three of my additions I use a lot in performance are:
– the ability to change patterns ‘instantly’ rather than only at the end of bars (like Ableton’s ‘legato’ loop switching)
– scaling tracks so that they can be longer than a single bar
– changing both the pattern bank and voice parameters automatically via MIDI

The full list of additions I’ve made is here, and you can track the changes I’ve made on github.

Thanks again to everyone who made it, I hope to do another event for Southampton soon!